Name: Word Tutorial - Formatting text with paste options
Uploaded: 2025-07-27T18:44:14.000Z
Duration: 4 min 14 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Sometimes, when you copy and paste text from one document to another, it can introduce some frustrating problems.

I'm starting with this document and this document, and I want to copy text from this document and paste it into the other.

Adverbs of manner

So naturally, I'm going to select that text, then I can go to the home ribbon and click the copy button, then switch over to the other document.

I'm just going to make a new paragraph in the middle of this section, then I'll go to the home ribbon and click the paste button to paste that text in.

And that worked fairly well, but we do have an issue.

The text that we pasted has a completely different font, size, and other formatting settings from the text that was already on this page.

So we have a mismatch in style that just looks bad.

Now we could manually fix it, or we could learn how to be smarter about copying and pasting.

So first, I'm going to undo that paste action.

So I'll go to the home ribbon and click the undo button, and it just takes us one step back.

And I'm going to paste it again, but this time, instead of simply clicking the paste button in the home ribbon, I'm going to click the arrow underneath the paste button, which opens up this menu.

And we're going to start by looking at paste special.

This gives you some options for how you can paste what you have on the clipboard.

And one of these options is unformatted text.

That will only paste the text that you have copied and will strip out any and all formatting.

I'll click OK, and it pasted in that text.

And in this case, the unformatted text that we pasted just takes on the formatting of the text around it.

So once again, I'll go to the home ribbon and click the undo button to take a step back.

And once again, we'll go to the paste button and click the arrow under the paste button.

And I want to focus on these four shortcuts up at the top of this menu.

But first, I'm not going to click on any of them.

Instead, I'm going to simply point at one of them without clicking.

And when I do that, it gives me a preview in the document of how this text would look when it's pasted.

This preview only works on Windows, not on a Mac.

But in this case, I can see what it would look like before I actually click the button.

So if I were to choose this first option, the Keep Source Formatting, it would paste this text with the formatting it had in the original document.

If I were to choose Merge Formatting, it would use the formatting from the document that I'm pasting into.

That will convert whatever I had copied into a picture and paste that into the document.

And then the Keep Text Only option is the same as that Paste as Unformatted Text option that we saw a moment ago.

So you'll see that Merge Formatting and Keep Text Only are very similar with just some subtle differences.

In both cases, we will end up with the font and size of the text in that destination document.

But because we just happen to be pasting something that's formatted as a bulleted list in the document, if we were to choose Merge Formatting, it would still be formatted as a bulleted list with the tabs associated with the list in this document.

But the font and the size will match the text on the page.

Now if I were to choose Keep Text Only, it strips out all formatting, including the formatting for the bulleted list.

Now granted, we do still see the actual bullets, but those would be converted to characters of text and the margins associated with that list would be stripped out.

So in this case, I think the best option is Merge Formatting.

I can click that, it pastes it in, and it looks pretty good.

But clearly, you need to choose whichever option works best for each scenario.